Last winter I undertook a remote residency with The Work Room, an artist led membership organisation in Glasgow dedicated to dance, movement and choreography. This was the first time I had put myself, my body, bodymind, thoughts, feelings and writing at the core of my movement research for a while. I invited the question “how can I hold a space for myself in the way I hold space for others?”
Over a period of 5 weeks, working 2-3 afternoons a week a new creative process emerged. A synergising of somatic experiencing, authentic movement and verbal improvisation created a space where memories, dreams, longing, and the present moment could be felt, moved and spoken. In the last 30 minutes of each session I would sit in a chair and write. Sometimes the words were a way to capture aspects of the movement improvisations or somatic experiences that arose in the sessions. Other times they were a follow on from the moving experience.
One year on, I am revisiting these journals and reflecting further on the embodied experiences within them. What the process of presencing myself in these integrated ways brought forth. A vital aliveness felt in stillness. The exquisitness of moving at the speed of sensation. How in alive stillness the painful tensions held in my body unravelled. How memories arose, people, places, different ages and stages of personal development. How I danced once again with my father, remembering the preciousness of connection as well as the pains and seperation of loss. How my right eye always feels different from my left eye. How funny things are. How in the depths of sorrow the light of playfulness can arrive, just like that. How awareness when given the space and time moves freely from one new moment to the next. From a fly on the floor to a consideration of the pointless of war, from cold air on my skin to the caw of a crow.
I am considering slowly how all this has travelled with me over the year, how it has contributed to the different strands of my outer and inner world work and I am curiously wondering what next?
Part of the next I feel is to share apects of these practices that I found to be helpful, in different ways, with other people, young and old, in 1:1’s in groups and Woman on Pause.
As I read the journals I feel a tender vulnerability to what emerged over the residency. I also feel the call to share some snippets of the writing process. Here are some excerps from the first week of the residency…
She sits in a chair
In the centre of the dance studio. Her legs stretch into a second chair; they are long but quite short. She has created for herself a portable hospitable space in which to be comfortable and at ease, creative, at home.
She discovers as she says the word h o m e, slowly to herself that there is an om in its centre.
Curious as to the epistemology of om, a sound she has been familiar with growing up as a young child in an international spiritual community she googles it on her phone, “a sacred syllable and primordial sound that represents the vibration of the Universe, embodying spiritual truth and divine energy.”
She likes that.
Last night, listening to a rousing political speech in a movie on Netflix, the following four words caught her attention so strongly she immediately wrote them down.
A
Love
Of
Home
Why did these four words call her so?
Could it have been because she’d had a conversation that day with a nursery worker and learned that of the 140 babies and young children in the daycare centre most were there for 50 hours a week. Lovingly cared for in a building, within a group, by a runway for jet planes and Nimrods.
How will this 50 hour week and the daily sounds of jet planes shape their experiences of home and of feeling at home in the world she wonders.
With her colleague she is working across 5 local nurseries to develop play kits to help support children and families through the emotional cycle of deployment.
She googles the word ‘deployment’
“The movement of troops or equipment to a place or position for military action.”
“The authorities announced deployment of extra security forces in towns and cities to prevent violence.”
Sitting in her chair, she contemplates these themes
Home…
Om….
Deployment..
She is wondering if we are being misguided, tricked into feeling threatened all the time because of a cultural conditioning of fear, of war, of fighting to get our needs met, basic ones sometimes, like shelter, food and warmth.
She is wondering how we have evolved this far to still be questioning this as our societal status quo.
She looks up status quo
“The existing state of affairs, especially regarding social or political issues.”
“They have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.”
She realises she’s been sitting for a long time in her comfortable chair in her portable hospitable space, in her home from home.
Parts of her are numbing out, going dead. Too long spent in her head. She gets up, puts on two Status Quo tracks and dances instead.
“Whatever You Want”
“Rocking All Over the World”
She does a grotesque dark expressionistic dance to these tracks. Expressive facially, butoh-esque. She imagines herself in full military gear with film imagery of deployment, masses of troops, and remembers that Kate Bush did something like this once in Army Dreamers.
She sits down to capture a moment of an earlier improvisation.
A toast to Ruby Worth
It’s taken a long, long time, forever, to cross this line between
Unworthiness and Worthiness
She moves between these two embodied spaces and shapes these states of being.
She also wants to remember the feeling and journey of her hands moving slowly and lovingly over her face and body. A familiar movement pattern to her. A re-cognition of her bodies call to experience safety and tenderness as it moves from an inner world to an outer space. Once again healing the trauma of her induced and drugged entry into the cold, harsh, brutalizing world as it was experienced then, the shocks to her system, to her vulnerable small body and big wide open senses. Held by her feet, hanging upside down, slapped on her bare skin, stuff put in her eyes, a body that has only known water and warmth stuck into a cold metal scale, the brightness of the lights, the long seperation from her mother.
OMMM
A Deep Peace Descends Her
She lies still
For a very long time
Attending
To her present moment
She’s very awake
Alert
safe
still
here
Wrapped up
Rolled up in a feathered quilt
Why do people always feel they have to sit up to meditate she wonders
Next to her is a small fly
She feels the fly is here with her
She talks to it
She tells the fly she is going to move towards the door and open it so it can go outside if it wants to
Being still and awake for so long has heightened and lightened her awareness and loosened the tensions she holds familiarly
When she opens up the door and feels the air on her skin and see’s the top of the tall pine trees dancing in the wind she feels her oneness with everything
She feels the exquisite grace of being in a state of loving awareness
She watches crows riding the wind
People she knows leaving buildings and cars
The crows caw and the car doors slam and all this time there is music
What more does she want to capture in this state of grace and the journey that led her here today?
As she wants her journey to be of benefit to others
To many many others
To mothers and fathers and babies and children and people everywhere
To those who cannot speak or walk or rest
How will she invite them to make their nest?
While she was cocooned in her feather quilt listening to her healing music, music as medicine, she thought of Marina Abromovich and her work with presencing and creating healing environments for people to enter into and be.
She thought of Tilda Swinton asleep in a gallery.
She thought of sleeping beauty in a glass box, perhaps she wasn’t poisoned. Perhaps she didn’t need to be kissed by a prince. Perhaps she just needed to rest for another 100 years.
The fly she notices is choosing to stay inside.
She is enjoying being on the threshold. Wrapped up and warm and feeling the wild cold air as it moves within the trees, waves through the bushes, bobs through the dandelion tips.
The seagull calls.
This precious space of Ruby’s Residency.
This amazing grace of Being Present.
To each moment as a gift.
She recalls a final moment before putting away her pen for the day.
A walking that turns to a talking of retiring from what is tiring and staying with what brings joy, ease, comfort, connection, creative expression, an expanded state of Being.
ALL ONE.
She chooses this path, not to retire, but to re-inspire.
I am not retiring, I am reinspiring.
I would love to know how these writings have met you. If you have the time and space to share this with me, drop me an email: ruby.worth@gmail.com